EU election observers have called on Gabon’s electoral commission to ensure votes are counted “with transparency and speed” after this weekend’s presidential election, where incumbent Ali Bongo is hoping for a second term.

Bongo, who took over from his late father in 2009 amid violence which saw the French consulate torched, is running for a second term.

The Gabon electoral commission is due to meet late tonight to announce the result, in meeting EU observers are barred from.

The EU observers said the vote was “managed in a way that lacked transparency”.

“The European Union repeats the call made by the head of its observer mission that results should be published for each polling booth,” a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in a statement.

Since Tuesday (30 August), the commission has fiercely debated a disputed vote result in one of the country’s nine provinces — the Haut-Ogooue, the heartland of Bongo’s Teke ethnic group.

A report claimed Bongo had won 95.5 percent of votes in the province, with turnout there at 99.9 percent.

Should the report’s findings be accepted as official, the incumbent would be able to claim 49.9% of votes nationwide, narrowly defeating Ping’s 48.2%.

In other words, Bongo would win by a tiny margin of just 5,594 votes.

Just under 628,000 people were registered to vote in the oil-rich Central African nation, home to 1.8 million people.

EXCLUSIVE / The EU plans to raise the pressure on six African countries to implement controversial free trade agreements by putting an end to their preferential access to the EU market. EurActiv France reports.

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The vote which maintained the incumbent president Ali Bongo in power was simply and plainly rigged. When most of the provinces’ results became known, showing that the incumbent was to be defeated, a poor attempt to reconstruct the stronghold of the president was hastely invented. Gabon once had an election where the winner obtained 100 percent of the vote under the one party rule. That was under the reign of the father of the current president. Let’s see what the EU and the UN will do.